Full-Text Articles in Law and Gender

Prosecuting Rape Victims While Rapists Run Free: The Consequences Of Police Failure To Investigate Sex Crimes In Britain And The United States, Lisa Avalos

Michigan Journal of Gender and Law

Imagine that a close friend is raped, and you encourage her to report it to the police. At first, she thinks that the police are taking her report seriously, but the investigation does not seem to move forward. The next thing she knows, they accuse her of lying and ultimately file charges against her. You and your friend are in shock; this outcome never entered your minds. This nightmare may seem inconceivable, but it has in fact occurred repeatedly in both the United States and Britain—countries that are typically lauded for their high levels of gender equality. In Britain ...

Fairness At A Price: Protecting The Integrity Of Athletic Competitions At The Expense Of Female Athletes, Annie Bach Yen Nguyen

Notre Dame Journal of International & Comparative Law

Ever since women were allowed to compete in the Olympics, they have been subjected to some form of gender verification. Initially, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) required female athletes to present certificates from their doctors confirming that they were in fact women. In 1966, the IOC and the IAAF “decided they couldn’t trust individual nations to certify femininity, and instead implemented a mandatory genital check of every woman competing at international games.” This process was dubbed the “nude parades”. In response to the overwhelming disapproval of such examination, the IOC and IAAF began ...

Susan D. Carle

In too many Title VII cases, employees find themselves thrown out of court because they reacted angrily to reasonable perceptions of employer discrimination. In the race context, supervisors repeatedly call employees the n-word and use other racial epithets, order African American employees to perform work others in the same job classification do not have to do, and impose discipline white employees do not face for the comparable conduct. In the gender context, courts throw out plaintiffs’ cases even where supervisors engage in egregious sexual harassment. Employees who react angrily to such demeaning treatment—by cursing, shouting, refusing an order or ...

Exercising The Right To Public Accommodations: The Debate Over Single-Sex Health Clubs, Miriam A. Cherry

Maine Law Review

Recently, the debate over single-sex health clubs gained national attention when a patent attorney, James Foster, sued for admission to Healthworks, a Massachusetts all-women's health club. Jurisdictions across the country have also been struggling with the issue, and no clear consensus has emerged. Besides highlighting a wide variance between state laws, the debate over single-sex health clubs illuminates tensions within current feminist thought and within the current legal doctrine surrounding public accommodations statutes. Specifically, the presence of single-sex health clubs, like the question of single-sex schools, asks whether, in some contexts, it is legally and morally acceptable for men ...

Power In The Age Of In/Equality: Economic Abuse, Masculinities, And The Long Road To Marriage Equality, Arianne Renan Barzilay

Akron Law Review

In an era when women have achieved formal legal equality, patriarchal power endures. In this article I take on a largely neglected subject: economic abuse. While this phenomenon has recently begun to generate awareness as a form of intimate partner violence, it currently lacks a theory and history with which to deeply understand it. A failure to recognize the profound roots enabling economic abuse contributes to its perpetuation, trivialization, and marginalization in legal thought. Such a failure has broad implications for gender equality. This Article offers both a history and a theory with which to understand the phenomenon’s deep ...

Surrogate Mothers, Gestational Carriers, And A Pragmatic Adaptation Of The Uniform Parentage Act Of 2000, John C. Sheldon

Maine Law Review

Recent medical advances that permit human conception without intercourse, in combination with sociological changes in our country, dramatically enlarge the population of adults who can produce or raise children. The legal price for this broadening of opportunity, however, is a diminishment of certainty: We are no longer sure whom we should identify as a child's parents. These are important questions, of course, because ready answers will quickly dampen disputes about custody and will immediately establish support obligations and the children's eligibility for health insurance, for inheritance, for Workers' Compensation benefits, and for Social Security survivor benefits. But as ...

Changing The First Lady’S Mystique: Defining The First Lady’S Legal Role And Upending Gender Norms, Ashlee A. Paxton-Turner

University of Massachusetts Law Review

This Article explores the lack of formal guidelines governing the First Lady by first considering the history of the role and how the three branches of government have typically dealt with the role. Attention is also given to the possible intersection with the anti-nepotism statute when and if the First Lady acts as an advisor to the President. This Article then goes on to suggest that this lack of formality has allowed gender norms to govern the role. In an era where women’s rights have resurfaced as a central theme in political discourse, this Article concludes by suggesting some ...

Georgia State University Law Review

The Act includes various amendments to Georgia’s criminal code. Three changes are most notable. First, the Act designates the offense of hijacking a motor vehicle as hijacking a motor vehicle in the first degree and creates the offense of hijacking a motor vehicle in the second degree. Second, the Act criminalizes the use of a device to film underneath or through an individual’s clothing. Lastly, the Act adds the drug Fentanyl and its various analogs to the list of controlled substances.

Decriminalization Of Prostitution: The Soros Effect, Jody Raphael

Dignity: A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence

This article explores the activities of George Soros and his charitable organization, Open Society Foundations (OSF), in advocating for the full decriminalization of the sex trade industry. Research finds that OSF spends only a small amount of money on grass roots “sex worker” groups around the world advocating for full decriminalization, but the foundation awards larger amounts of funds to large human rights groups whose reports and policies have a wider reach. OSF’s rationale for full decriminalization fails to consider violence and coercion in the sex trade industry, misreads research, and does not include research from venues where full ...

Now You See Me: Problems And Strategies For Introducing Gender Self-Determination Into The Eighth Amendment For Gender Nonconforming Prisoners, Lizzie Bright

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

As the fight for transgender rights becomes more visible in the United States, the plight of incarcerated transgender individuals seeking medical care behind bars is likewise gaining attention—and some trans prisoners are gaining access to gender-affirming care. However, progress for incarcerated members of the trans community has been slow, piecemeal, and not without problems. As federal court opinions in Eighth Amendment access-to-care cases brought by trans prisoners show, how a court interprets the subjective intent requirements of the Eighth Amendment and how the imprisoned plaintiff pleads his/her/their case can make or break the claim. Further, courts and ...

A Critical Analysis Of The Women's Constitutional And Legal Rights In Zimbabwe In Relation To The Convention Of The Elimination Of All Forms Of Discrimination Against Women, Amy S. Tsanga

Maine Law Review

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) comprehensively outlines the international standards on the rights of women that are to be pursued by State Parties to the Convention. Adopted by the General Assembly in 1979, it entered into force in 1981 and set the scene for a comprehensive approach to the human rights of women by State Parties that have ratified the Convention. The underlying spirit of the Convention is that discrimination against women violates principles of equality and respect for human dignity and presents obstacles to the advancement of women in the political ...

Maine Law Review

The joy and the challenge of being located in an academic setting is that I am also able to engage in forays (albeit intermittent forays) into scholarly analysis. Delivering this lecture, and publishing this piece, provides an excellent opportunity for me to engage in such a foray. This piece, then, is a scholarly reflection on my advocacy experiences. My goal is to use my experiences in advocacy as fertile soil from which to create, I hope, a lovely flower of theory and conceptual thought. Before setting out on this endeavor, however, I would like to offer two postulates. There are ...

Caring For Workers, Martha T. Mccluskey

Maine Law Review

This essay examines the question of conflict between market work and family care from the angle of family caretaking labor for workers rather than for dependents. Feminist legal scholars and activists have been concerned for generations about the effect of women's unpaid caretaking work on women's participation and success in the wage labor market. Better public support for this gendered family care work is crucial to many leading visions of feminist legal and economic change. Recent welfare reforms, however, have increased the extent to which public policy treats caretaking instead as a personal responsibility (or a sign of ...

Maine Law Review

Contemporary social policy relating to women's employment remains strikingly ambivalent. Those in favor of traditional family structures, a position that is generally associated with conservative political agendas, have often expressed a preference for a family model that emphasizes the woman's role as a homemaker, or to use the more recent term, a caretaker. At the same time, as the 1996 Welfare Reform Act demonstrates, if the choice is between providing financial support that would enable lower-income women to stay in the home and forcing those women into the labor market, the conservative agenda will opt for the latter ...

Maine Law Review

According to Working Mother magazine, telecommuting is a “wonderful arrangement for working moms.” Advertisements for telecommuting jobs and related technologies show us pictures of these happy telecommuting moms, who are conducting important business on the telephone or typing busily at their computers, as their smiling toddlers play quietly by their sides or sit contentedly in their laps. Some employers have offered this wonderful experience in direct response to concerns raised by “women's issues” committees. That was probably just what Jack Nilles had in mind when he first coined the term “telecommuting” in the 1970s and described it as a ...

Maine Law Review

Almost forty years after the enactment of Title VII, women's struggle for equality in the workplace continues. Although Title VII was intended to “break[] down old patterns of segregation and hierarchy,” the American workplace remains largely gender-segregated. Indeed, more than one-third of all women workers are employed in occupations in which the percentage of women exceeds 80%. Even in disciplines in which women have made gains, top status (and top paying) jobs remain male-dominated while the lower status jobs are filled by women. This pattern of gender segregation, in turn, accounts for a substantial part of the persistent wage ...

An Essay On The Production Of Youth Prostitution, Libby Alder

Maine Law Review

Youth prostitution is more multidimensional than I think most of us are prone to admit. This essay is designed to raise the profile of some of its less prominent aspects—aspects which are not unknown exactly, but which are underrecognized and generally ignored in the context of legal analysis. The phenomenon of youth prostitution involves some thorny, sometimes confusing, issues, but those issues are eclipsed by an ideology that fails to grapple with the complexity of youth agency and the consequent position of youth in law. The result is that some kids are left inadequately served and others are utterly ...

Lessons From The Fields: Female Farmworkers And The Law, Maria L. Ontiveros

Maine Law Review

In both the fields of labor law and gender studies, we learn the most from experience. The experience of workers coming together to demand equality and respect and the experience of women coming together to share their experiences has led to most of what we study in these fields. Unfortunately, too many times traditional legal doctrine does not fit these experiences. In those cases, we must struggle to change the law to be responsive to the lived experiences of women and workers. This Article explores the lived experiences of one particular group of workers—immigrant farmworking women in California. From ...

Maine Law Review

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII) prohibits discrimination against men because they are men and against women because they are women. This familiar characterization of the Act has been quoted in dozens of sex discrimination cases to support a narrow view of who is protected against sex discrimination in this country. When transsexuals file suit, “[e]mployment discrimination jurisprudence at both the federal and state levels ... captures transsexuals in a discourse of exclusion from social participation. This wide net, using a remarkably refined system of semantic manipulations, snags all claims launched by transsexuals and reveals ...

Sex, Allies And Bfoqs: The Case For Not Allowing Foreign Corporations To Violate Title Vii In The United States, Keith Sealing

Maine Law Review

The extent to which foreign corporations as well as their domestic subsidiaries can discriminate against American employees on the basis of sex, age, religion, and national origin in a manner that would be acceptable under their own laws and customs but inimical to American law is currently determined by a muddled jumble of circuit court opinions interpreting a “[w]e express no view” Supreme Court footnote. As a result, American victims of sexual discrimination have much less protection under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when the discriminating actor is a foreign corporation or its domestic subsidiary ...

Congressional Power To Regulate Sex Discrimination: The Effect Of The Supreme Court's "New Federalism", Calvin Massey

Maine Law Review

Congressional power to prevent and remedy sex discrimination in employment has been founded almost entirely upon the commerce power and Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which gives Congress power “to enforce, by appropriate legislation” the equal protection guarantee. The commerce power has enabled Congress to prohibit private sex discrimination in employment, and the combination of the commerce and enforcement powers has enabled Congress to prohibit such sex discrimination by public employers. From the late 1930s until the early 1990s the doctrinal architecture of these powers was relatively stable, even if statutory action to realize the promise of a nondiscriminatory ...

The Unenforced Promise Of Equal Pay Acts: A National Problem And Possible Solution From Maine, Elizabeth J. Wyman Esq.

Maine Law Review

Equal pay for women is a concept that has been around for a long time. It was during World War I that women were first guaranteed pay equity in the form of regulations enforced by the War Labor Board of 1918. The Board's equal pay policy required manufacturers, who put women on the payroll while male employees were serving in the military, to pay those women the same wages that were paid to the men. The National War Labor Board continued that trend through World War II. Shortly after the war, states began enacting statutes that required employers to ...

Keynote Address: The Difference "Difference" Makes, Deborah L. Rhode

Maine Law Review

Over the last two decades, we have witnessed a transformation for women in law, but not a transformation in leadership positions. Almost 30% of lawyers are women, but they represent only about 15% of federal judges and law firm partners, and about 10% of law school deans and general counsel positions at Fortune 500 companies. The same patterns are apparent in other leadership sectors, such as management and politics. Women are half the electorate but only 15% of Congress and 6% of state governors. They account for about half of managers but only 1% of the Chief Executive Officers of ...